Cyber insurance of information systems: Security and privacy cyber insurance contracts for ICT and helathcare organizations

Nowadays, more-and-more aspects of our daily activities are digitalized. Data and assets in the cyber-space, both for individuals and organizations, must be safeguarded. Thus, the insurance sector must face the challenge of digital transformation in the 5G era with the right set of tools. In this paper, we present CyberSure-an insurance framework for information systems. CyberSure investigates the interplay between certification, risk management, and insurance of cyber processes. It promotes continuous monitoring as the new building block for cyber insurance in order to overcome the current obstacles of identifying in real-time contractual violations by the insured party and receiving early warning notifications prior the violation. Lightweight monitoring modules capture the status of the operating components and send data to the CyberSure backend system which performs the core decision making. Therefore, an insured system is certified dynamically, with the risk and insurance perspectives being evaluated at runtime as the system operation evolves. As new data become available, the risk management and the insurance policies are adjusted and fine-tuned. When an incident occurs, the insurance company possesses adequate information to assess the situation fast, estimate accurately the level of a potential loss, and decrease the required period for compensating the insured customer. The framework is applied in the ICT and healthcare domains, assessing the system of medium-size organizations. GDPR implications are also considered with the overall setting being effective and scalable

Space Weather and Rail: Findings and Outlook

Space weather caused by solar activity can disrupt and damage critical infrastructures in space and on the ground. Space-weather impacts to the power grid, aviation, communication, and navigation systems have already been documented. Since society relies increasingly on the services these critical infrastructures provide, awareness of the space weather threat needs to be increased and the associated risks assessed. While most research on impacts of space weather focuses on the power grid, the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), and aviation, railway networks are also a potential area for concern. Anomalies in signalling systems have been observed during geomagnetic storms, and rail transport depends on power, communications, and progressively on GNSS for timing and positioning. In order to raise awareness of this topic, and to further explore the vulnerability of rail systems to space weather, the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency, the UK Department for Transport, and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration jointly organised the “Space weather and rail” workshop in London on 16-17 September 2015. The workshop was attended by representatives from the railway sector, insurance, European and North American government agencies, academia, and the European Commission. This report presents the main findings and conclusions of this workshop.JRC.G.5-Security technology assessmen

Abstracts of Ph.D. theses in mathematics

summary:Stolín, Radek: Teaching of financial and insurance mathematics at secondary and higher professional schools -- coinsurance in bonus-malus systems in automobile insurance. Olejníèková, Jana: Scientific work of Bohumil Bydžovský. Flašková, Jana: Ultrafilters and small sets. Pražák, Pavel: Differential equations and their applications in economics. Bartl, David: Theorems of the alternative and linear programming in infinite-dimensional spaces. Smetana, Petr: Some problems of the private health insurance. Kosinka, Jiøí: Algorithms for Minkowski Pythagorean hodograph curves. Kopa, Miloš: Utility functions in portfolio optimization. Orsáková, Martina: M-estimation in nonlinear regression for longitudal data. Šiman, Miroslav: On portmanteau tests of randomness. Purmová, Lucie: Continuous population models for single species. Koubková, Alena: Sequential change-point analysis. Omelka, Marek: Second order properties of some M-estimators and R-estimators. Barto, Libor: Full embeddings and their modifications. Pecinová, Eliška: Ladislav Svante Rieger (1916--1963). Nguyen, Duc Huy: On existence and regularity of solutions to perturbed systems of Stokes type. Prachaø, Aleš: Analysis of the discontinuous Galerkin method for elliptic problems. Franek, Peter: Several Dirac operators in parabolic geometry. Hladík, Milan: Explicit description of supporting and separating hyperplanes of two convex polyhedral sets depending on parameters. Janeèek, Martin: Valuation techniques of life insurance liabilities. Ranocha, Pavel: Stationary distribution of time series. Bímová, Daniela: Kinematic geometry in $n$-dimensional Euclidean space

Space Weather and Financial Systems: Findings and Outlook. An event co-organised by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, the UK Civil Contingencies Secretariat and the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Centre 27 June, 2014, London, UK

Space weather can affect both ground-based and space-borne infrastructures, potentially resulting in failures or service disruptions across the globe and causing damage to equipment and systems. With society having become increasingly reliant on the services these infrastructures provide, a more thorough analysis of the risk due to extreme space weather is warranted. Most studies on the impact of space weather on infrastructures focus on the high-voltage power grid, aviation and communication. A less well-known area of potential vulnerability is the impact of space weather on the financial services sector. Elements of this sector’s operations depend on accurate timing, a service which is increasingly provided by space based – and therefore space weather prone - technologies. The Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), for example, is commonly used for deriving time stamps for financial transactions. In order to address this topic, the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, the UK Civil Contingencies Secretariat, and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration jointly organised the “Space weather and financial services” workshop in London on 27 June 2014. The half-day workshop was attended by 50 representatives of the financial service industry, insurance, European and US government agencies, regulators, academia and the European Commission. The objectives of the workshop were to discuss the potential impact of extreme space weather on financial services, in particular through the effect on timing systems of a loss of GNSS services, and to raise the awareness of this risk in the sector. This report presents the findings of this workshop.JRC.G.5-Security technology assessmen

Paper Session I-C - Commercial Space Infrastructure: Giving Industry a Lift

Historically, the private sector\u27s involvement in space-related commercial activities has been primarily in the fields of communications and, to a lesser degree, remote sensing and launch systems. But today there are other opportunities for space-oriented, profit-making activities. The provision of commercial infrastructure -- hardware and related integration services to support industrial research and product development activities -- is a potential revenue-producing industry. The National Space Council defines five principal areas of commercial space activity satellite communications, space transportation, remote sensing, materials processing, and commercial infrastructure. This paper, in discussing commercial infrastructure, also addresses commercial space transportation (launch services). Discussed are private sector initiatives directed toward establishing a commercial space sector in the fields of commercial space transportation, upper stages, payload processing, launch facilities, and other facilities and equipment. Not discussed, but recognized as important elements of commercial space infrastructure, are the legal, financial, and insurance industries. Also not included in this paper are private-sector initiatives for financing projects primarily for government use where the government controls the design, development, and management of the project and repays the private sector entity for its initial financial investment

A first analysis on the need to integrate ecological aspects into financial insurance

It is known that financial insurance can address the economic impacts of a natural disaster, but some ecological aspects can play a crucial role in mitigating the overall risks for socio-ecological systems. To better strengthen the study of these relations, the aims of this paper are: (1) to analyze the main research topics of the scientific literature on ecological and/or financial-economic insurance to face natural disasters, through a co-word network analysis; (2) to analyze the temporal trends of the total Gross Insurance Premium and Meteorological and climatological extreme events in 29 OECD countries; and (3) to carry out a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of some selected variables in order to conceptualize a first empirical model combining financial-economic and ecological insurance to face natural disasters. The literature review has shown a predominance of topics related to financial insurance (about 60%), and the co-word map of key words has highlighted a common space where economic and ecological insurances interact. PCA highlighted three major components explaining 90.6% of the overall variation and discriminating aspects more related to the “financial” insurance, from those related to the “ecological” insurance. More in detail, PC1, which represents the financial insurance, explains the 60.4% of variation, PC2 and PC3 that represent surrogates of the “ecological” insurance explain respectively the 19.6% and the 10.6% of variation. On the basis of the application of the proposed empirical model, countries with high levels of financial and ecological preparedness have been identified. The next steps of this research will be focused on a pilot study area where a quantitative assessment will be applied to better define the landscape contribution to natural disaster risk mitigation, the analysis of the role of social capital through a cross-scales approach, in terms of policies and management strategies, and the investigation of innovative economic tools to take into account specific payment for ecosystem services in the context of natural disasters

Practices in Adequate Structural Design

Structural design and verification of space vehicles and space systems is a very tricky and awe inspiring business, particularly for manned missions. Failures in the missions with loss of life is devastating personally and nationally. The scope of the problem is driven by high performance requirements which push state-of-the-art technologies, creating high sensitivites to small variations and uncertainties. Insurance of safe, reliable flight dictates the use of sound principles, procedures, analysis, and testing. Many of those principles which were refocused by the Space Shuttle Challenger (51-L) accident on January 26, 1986, and the activities conducted to insure safe shuttle reflights are discussed. The emphasis will be focused on engineering, while recognizing that project and project management are also key to success

Incentive compatibility and pricing under moral hazard

We study a simple insurance economy with moral hazard, in which random contracts overcome the non-convexities generated by the incentive-compatibility constraints. The novelty is that we use linear programming and duality theory to study the relation between incentive compatibility and pricing. Using linear programming has the advantage that we can impose the incentive-compatibility constraints on the agents that are uninformed (the insurance firms). In contrast, most of the general equilibrium literature imposes them on the informed agents (the consumers). We derive the two welfare theorems, establish the existence of a competitive equilibrium, and characterize the equilibrium prices and allocations. Our competitive equilibrium has two key properties: (i) the equilibrium prices reflect all the relevant information, including the welfare costs arising from the incentive-compatibility constraints; (ii) the equilibrium allocations are the same as when the incentive-compatibility constraints are imposed on the consumers

A Case Study in Optimization of Resource Distribution to Cope with Unanticipated Changes in Requirements

It is a known fact that requirements change continuously, and as a consequence, it may be necessary to reschedule development activities so that the new requirements can be addressed in a costeffective manner. Unfortunately, changes in requirements cannot be specified precisely. Moreover, current software development methods do not provide explicit means to adapt development processes with respect to unanticipated changes in requirements. This article first proposes a method based on Markov Decision Theory, which determines the estimated optimal development schedule with respect to probabilistic product demands and resource constraints. Second, a tool is described that is built to support the method. Finally, some experimental results are presented on the applicability of the proposed method